Greg Hill doesn’t necessarily want to talk to the media. He’s worried about how he should present himself now that he’s a “novelist.”

Does he play up his intellectual side, become one of those pipe-and-jacket authors? Or does he go gonzo like others — surround himself with guns; “mace the reporter”?

His image matters right now, he jokes, because even if his new book doesn’t sell, if the pages are used only as insulation in a homeless guy’s jacket, “It will be in my obituary,” he said.

“Greg Hill,” he pretended to read in a nasally English tone, “winner of the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for general fiction, has died. . . . No matter how long I live, that’s going to be in there,” he says with a laugh and a shake of his head.

The whole thing is still odd to the north Denver resident: his novel, “East of Denver,” chosen as one of two national winners; a $15,000 advance; a book deal with the Penguin Group and the support of its editors, publicists and book-peddling army.

Maybe he’ll get used to it once the book comes out in about a year. But the 38-year-old, whose day job is buying books for the University of Denver, still asks himself, “Why me?”

“I feel guilty because everybody works so hard and everyone I know is doing creative stuff — every single one of them is good at it.” And it seems like to make it these days, “You either have to be friends with somebody or get a recommendation from somebody, or be freakin’ lucky, like I have.”

Luck? Maybe. It was William Shake- speare who said, “Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.” (And oddly enough, the main character in Hill’s book is named Shakespeare Williams.)

But Hill’s book didn’t write itself; it didn’t beat out almost 5,000 other submissions because it caught a nice current. It’s actually a good read.

Hill had originally set out to write a story on zombies.

“It was going to be the zombie attack in eastern Colorado, it was going to be fun, like people are going to enjoy this book. Zombies are popular — maybe even throw in some teenage vampires.”

But that idea mutated into a story about a man who goes home to eastern Colorado and finds his father with severe Alzheimer’s disease; the family finances, like the weeds tangling the old barn, threaten to choke the estate.

Then the main character decides that he’s going to rob a bank so he can keep the family farm. He talks his languishing and unwitting father into helping him. The idea of duping someone with Alzheimer’s into robbing a bank was too much to resist for Hill. He liked the idea “because that’s inappropriate” — good stuff for a novel.

And Alzheimer’s is partly what turned the story from a tale of the stiff, growling undead into one of a son and his father and their contemporary struggle to keep the land they own.

Hill’s 71-year-old father has Alzheimer’s. He has seen firsthand the slow brittling of a man’s mind. He said he wanted to show how severe and horrible it could be to have the disease, without making the character pitiful.

More important, he wanted to document what he calls the “Un-homesteading of America,” Hill said.

“There is a general entropy, and weeds are always growing, and things are falling apart, and humans are falling apart — unless you can sustain these things. And you can’t just let things stay the same. You have to put energy into them.”

And maybe, in the end, the book really was about a bunch of zombies: about hopeless men wandering around a land they thought they had conquered, wasting their lives on unfulfilled dreams, drugs and the devastation of others.

He’ll probably save the money he won from the contest — kind of lame, he knows. Or maybe he’ll use some of it to buy a fancy microphone for his rock band, “The Baby Sitters.”

Soon he’ll start working on another book. And this one, he jokes, is definitely going to be about zombies.

“In the rock ‘n’ roll world — at least on the level that me and some other bands inhabit, we do everything ourselves: We record it in the garage, print the (CD), do the artwork, throw out our little thing to the press. And here, I just write the music — or, not the music, what is this thing, a book? — and other people are doing everything.

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